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Pipedot has picked up on this remarkable New Scientist article: "Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death."
From the article:
Doctors will try to save the lives of 10 patients with knife or gunshot wounds by placing them in suspended animation, buying time to fix their injuries. ... The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. ... At lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half an hour after they have stopped breathing. ... The technique was first demonstrated in pigs in 2002.
The surgeon leading the trial (who apparently prefers to avoid the term "suspended animation") says he "eventually hopes to extend the technique to other conditions." I'm not surprised. Isn't the potential here enormous?
And the ethical issues are interesting in their own right. These are discussed towards the end of the article, and in this separate (self-contradictory) opinion piece (which appeared in print under the headline "Opt out is a cop-out").
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:50PM
That's hardly the point. The point is that cooling a person with traumatic injuries can extend the amount of time you have to fix the problem(s).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:57PM
Uhm, so we should just ignore all other aspects because of what the "point" is?
from TFA "After we did those experiments, the definition of 'dead' changed," says Rhee. "Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It's frustrating to know there's a solution."
(Score: 1) by monster on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:56AM
But being able to suspend someone doesn't mean you will be able to "resume" them later. In fact, that is the problem with current cryogenic techniques. There will be some cases where you can save lives you would previously simply declare dead, but there will also be cases where even suspension isn't enough and the person is going to die anyway. I think that in the future this will be just another treatment like intubation and induced coma.
Brain damage must also be taken into account: You could end up with a live body with a "dead" brain. If the brain is so damaged that the mind is no longer functional, even at basic functions, is the person really alive?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02 2014, @07:05PM
The current ability to retore peoples health isn't central to the question, sometimes people heal all on their own even though doctors claim that they have no chance of survival.
The point is if we don't have a good way of determining if someone is actually dead, where do we actually draw the line? And is it even morally ok to take peoples parts if we can't say for sure that they are dead?